On October 20th Google announced a major refresh of their Cloud Storage. Included in the refresh are four new storage classes: Multi-regional, Regional, Nearline and Coldline. These storage options, along with new data lifecycle management tools and improved availability, are intended to make it easy for Google customers to store their data with the right type of storage, at lower cost.
The Google announcement stated “whether a business needs to store and stream multimedia to their users, or restore a critical archive without waiting for hours or days, Google Cloud Storage now offers a broad range of storage options to meet those needs.”
It went on to describe each storage option, and the benefits of each one, and pointed to examples such as Vimeo, a media hosting and streaming service, that uses the Multi-Regional option to ensure high availability, and low-latency access to data.
I’ve already been asked by some of our customers to share my thoughts on what this means to their businesses, as many of them are engaged in activating data to create new services and insights. So I thought I’d share my thoughts here.
I believe that the changes to Google Cloud Storage will benefit all organizations that recognize that data is key to driving better business outcomes. We see that these changes will be especially helpful in the following ways:
- More storage options help companies create optimal performance/price mixes. As data storage needs continue to grow, increasing the size of storage alone doesn’t help organizations optimize their storage strategy. Multimedia serving, Data analytics and Archiving, are just a few examples of applications that require different storage options if price and performance are to be optimized. Google’s move to adding new storage classes gives enterprises more options – more ingredients to use when creating the best possible “meal” at the best possible cost.
- Well-priced low latency storage options can unlock options within a data strategy that weren’t cost effective until now. With the new Nearline option that offers millisecond latency for the same price that others charge for offline storage with multi-hour retrieval service, accessing more of the company’s data just became cost effective. When combined with a unified API for all storage tiers, this opens the door to even more creative uses of more data to drive more business outcomes.
- Service options like Multi-regional can bring reliability and increased responsiveness to companies who are delivering data services to geographically diverse consumers. Seamless cross-region replication for redundancy and data supports the ever-increasing need to make all data-driven products and services available 100 percent of the time and responsive to all users regardless of geography. Multi-regional storage recognize the growing need to service data consumers globally with reliable, responsive services.
We’ve seen Google investing in many enterprise-focused innovations, but it’s great to see that they continue to innovate at the fundamental platform level – not just matching what enterprises are asking for, but also pushing the envelope to enable the cost-effective development of more and more uses for data in a business context.
For more information, read the full Google announcement here.
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